One World Government!

Being foolish, Tim has agreed to write an essay about global government as part of his course. Being foolish, yesterday I responded to his question on what might be the arguments against a one world government. We had a fine old chat and I forgot about it as soon as I put the phone down. Yet this morning, I was finishing reading Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down, and what should I find but this:

New forms of democracy are essential… And any kind of new democracy must encompass not only communities, towns, cities and societies, but humankind as a whole. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how we’ll prosper together on this tiny planet if we don’t eventually have some kind of democratic world government. Of course, many hard-nosed realists would say that this is an implausible and even scary idea. Maybe that’s only because alternatives to our current trajectory remain so difficult to imagine. (p.306)

Count me amongst those hard-nosed realists. I greatly enjoyed - and still recommend - Homer-Dixon’s The Ingenuity Gap, but this new book is much weaker, and this was one of the points where it just falls apart under the weight of its own presumptions.

People who oppose “one world government” are frequently given to going on (and on and on) about black helicopters and the UN. Needless to say, they are usually colossal bores and not worth listening to. There are serious ideological arguments against such global democratic forms, but they’re weak because if you don’t share the assumptions of the underlying ideology, then you’re unlikely to be persuaded. My opposition to the development of global democratic forms is purely practical - democratic forms simply don’t scale well.

The transaction costs of such forms would be so great that any such organisation would collapse under its own weight. Imagine if you made a human 60 ft high; it wouldn’t be able to hold its weight up and would asphyxiate quite quickly, because we’re just not designed (and no, this isn’t an argument for intelligent design) to be that big. Anybody that’s worked in the United Nations system will be able to attest to the fact that the requirements of getting radically different actors to work in the same system requires a bureaucracy that is barely able to function, let alone function effectively.

More importantly, however, is the simple truth that the larger you make a democracy, the less representative it must be. This is because there are less possibilities for direct links between the constituency and the representative, and therefore less accountability. Oh, it would be possible to construct a complex tower of democracy that started at the grassroots level and ended up representing the whole world - but there would be little to no link between the grassroots and the global, and so the entire point of building such a structure would be defeated.

It surprises me that Homer-Dixon doesn’t pick up on this, because parts of the book are devoted to the diminishing returns of complexity (particularly Joseph Tainter’s seminal work, the Collapse of Complex Societies) - and it’s hard to see how such a global democratic form could be anything other than unsustainably complex.